Top Digital Marketing Tools of 2019
Updated: Apr 14, 2023
What are the top digital marketing tools of 2019? Well, we asked 20 digital marketing experts to share which tools make the biggest impact on performance. Here is what they had to say…
My name is Tomasz Alemany owner of Top Whole Life, a site that brings in over 14,000 unique organic visitors a month and 600 plus leads a month.
One of the great tools that we have been using in our marketing and SEO optimization efforts is Google Optimize. Google Optimize is a free tool that lets you test anything you can think of on your website.
Let me give you an example, we had a great article and in the process of improving it added a video to the content. Over the months it started going down in conversions and clicks. So we thought the cause was the video.
I used Google Optimize to test the same page with a video and without a video.
The results were shocking – Our conversion rate increased over 90%!!
Since then we have begun to use the tool to test many different aspects of our website, and things are improving dramatically.
Google came out with Optimize a few years ago, but it was very hard to use. However, they updated the platform and it is very easy to run quick tests.
Tomasz Alemany CEO and Founder Whole Life Insurance Quotes Online
I was previously an SEO Manager at PayPal and Airbnb, and now I run a startup called ClickMinded, a digital marketing training course for marketers and entrepreneurs: https://www.clickminded.com
There’s a number of tools you can use in 2019 to accelerate your digital marketing efforts. Here are some of our favorites:
KWFinder – This is one of my favorite tools for keyword research. Not only are the suggestions great, but they show you the live search results for that term while you’re doing the research. Super useful for eyeballing how difficult the keyword is.
Keywords Everywhere – A great free chrome plugin that’ll show you the search volume of keywords out in the wild, while you’re just going about your day Googling things. This is a great, passive way to accidentally stumble upon keywords with massive search volume opportunities.
Ahrefs – The single best backlink analysis tool. Period. My personal favorite. Their link database seems to be the largest, and the way you can cut the link data is extremely comprehensive.
Link Grabber – A simple, free chrome plugin that grabs all the links on a page and lets you easily add them to your clipboard to copy/paste.
SEO Minion – Another great, free SEO chrome plugin that has a number of great features, including an on-Page SEO analysis, highlighting all the broken links on a page, SERP preview and more.
Screaming Frog – A fantastic tool for crawling your site and understanding the myriad technical problems that are inevitably happening. Screaming Frog crawls your website just like Google does, and tells you exactly what you need to fix.
Tommy Griffith Founder https://www.clickminded.com
Ahrefs is by far the most valuable tool I’ve used to drive digital marketing results in 2019. Ironically, I used Ahrefs to find a keyword gap and decided to rank for the branded term “Ahrefs” (Google “Ahrefs” to see GotchSEO.com).
This guide has driven 23,331 website visitors since I published it in March 2018. It’s also largely responsible for the affiliate commissions we’ve earned as an Ahrefs affiliate since then. The main takeaway here is that you should use Ahrefs to identify non-competitive keywords and then attack those keywords relentlessly.
Nathan Gotch Founder of Gotch SEO The Gotch SEO Company
Ahrefs is our tool of choice — its keyword explorer feature gives very accurate estimates of volume, and it has a “keyword difficulty” metric that gives you a simple measure of how hard it will be to rank for a keyword, along with an estimate of the number of links you’ll need to rank on the first page.
Jaren Nichols COO Zipbooks
All of our content marketing efforts have a strong SEO foundation, and my favorite tool for doing keyword research is SEMrush.
Google Search Console is great for identifying which search terms are being used to find your existing content, but the Organic Research report in SEMrush takes the cake when it comes to finding opportunities for new topics.
How does my team know it’s valuable? We recently analyzed two years’ worth of Google keyword rankings (top 100 organic positions and top 10 organic positions) for 10+ of MARION’s clients and compared the average monthly rankings growth before and after we added SEMrush to our SEO and content marketing process.
There was a 286% increase in the average monthly growth of our top 100 positions and a 733% increase in the average monthly growth of our page one rankings.
Our marketing processes have undergone other major improvements during that time, but I know for certain that SEMrush was a major contributor to the acceleration of our results!
Tony Mastri is a Marketing Specialist at MARION Marketing Company, a Texas-based agency that has been in business for nearly 40 years.
Tony Mastri, Marketing Specialist www.marion.com
SEMrush has been around for several years and if I’m honest I used to flip flop between Ahrefs and SEMrush. But they have really been stepping up their game with site auditing tools, social media toolkit, and even creating a toolkit for content marketing.
SEMrush’s auditing tools helped our clients increase their visibility an average of 3% in the last 60 days just by cleaning up technical SEO issues.
Their content marketing toolkit has reduced the time it takes me to create a content calendar for clients by 2-3 hours per client and their content is planned for the YEAR.
I can easily research what are the optimal keywords, find what content has been already created and what opportunities are available for my clients to exploit.
From there I can quickly create the outline needed for my writers to quickly create articles that are optimized both for the readers and for SEO. Plus, with their link building tools I can easily find where to get backlinks, audit the ones already created, and remove potentially toxic elements.
I will admit that the service is not super cheap, but the value is absolutely worth every penny.
Derek Bryant Director of Content Marketing http://www.ezmarketing.com/
One of our favorite tools we use as an agency is WordStream to manage our paid campaigns.
We have all our clients on their platform because it enables us to leverage AI to get right to improvements to our campaigns as well as save time. Since implementing WordStream, we’ve seen a growth of conversions over 50% across all clients while reducing their cost per acquisition by 30%.
Wordstream allows us to help our clients save money as well as improve our profitability.
Joanne Hernon, Partner Growth Ledge Agency www.growthledge.com
Keyword Hero is my tool of the year so far. This tool brings many of your organic keywords back into Google Analytics.
One of my accounts went from showing 485 keywords to 4749 keywords! We’ve been able to use this data to improve organic and paid search programs.
Craig Streaman Streaman Marketing http://craigstreaman.com/ @CraigStreaman
Without a doubt, one of my most essential tools is Supermetrics.
Supermetrics turns Google Sheets and Data Studio into a data warehouse for marketers. https://supermetrics.com. It has a built-in connector that can automatically pull data from various marketing sources which you can pull together in a single document.
In a role that comprises acquisition and analytics, I’m able to shave off 5-6 hours a week and really dive deeper into the analysis. I use it to connect Google Sheets with Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, and Google Analytics. When I pair it together with G-Connector for Salesforce, I am able to match my ad spend to hard business results.
I built a Performance Marketing Dashboard with this tool combo in the last month.
Matt Litwin Senior Digital Strategist Bus.com
Screaming Frog is an invaluable tool for auditing the technical SEO of a website or campaign. I like that it provides fast and accurate breakdowns of everything from metadata to canonicals, that are easy to digest and export.
The time-saving benefits of this tool have allowed me to focus more on building campaigns and fixing issues, instead of chasing down data and potential errors.
Best of all, Screaming Frog is free and easy to use, making it an essential tool for digital marketing beginners and veterans.
Matt Benevento Senior SEO Specialist https://www.geekpoweredstudios.com/
The Alexa SEO Audit Tool is one of my favorite resources. All you have to do is past your website URL into the field, and Alexa will do the rest.
This tool provides you with a full SEO audit of your entire site and gives you a report card on how your website grades regarding SEO as well as suggestions on how to optimize such as duplicate title tags, redirects, broken links, image descriptions, duplicate meta description, etc.
The Alexa audit tool allows me to keep up to date on the overall health of my website and alerts me to any new problems that may have an adverse effect on my SEO ranking. Since implementing this tool, we have seen our overall organic sessions increase by 84%.
Jackie Tihanyi Digital Marketing Specialist https://www.fisherunitech.com
One of my favorite tools for title tag tests is ClickFlow.
ClickFlow pulls data from Google Search Console and compares the former title tag’s performance against the current title tag’s performance.
This comparison makes it easy to evaluate the success of a test and implement successful trends across pages.
Alice Stevens Content Marketing Specialist Bestcompany.com
When it comes to automated marketing, few tools are as practical and user-friendly as MailChimp. The highly-rated newsletter service is the ultimate software for marketing teams looking to create an attractive and effective email campaign.
MailChimp also makes ad campaigns easier and more effective while also creating more appealing landing pages. The user-friendly marketing tool has helped us create a flexible email campaign that proved to be significantly more successful than our previous efforts.
After switching to MailChimp, we saw our open-rate jump to around 25% with a click-rate of 5%.
Nate Masterson CMO Natemasterson.com
“One of the best advertising tools is Google Ads. Although there might be a lot of business that “tried Google Ads and it didn’t work”, there’s a big difference in setting up a proper campaign and actively optimizing it to get better results.
I still believe that Google Ads is one of the most effective ways of online advertising. One of our clients – a tech startup – had been struggling to achieve growth.
By re-structuring their Google Ads account and setting up an optimization schedule, we have been able to grow their sales with 66%, while CPA decreased with 11%.”
Jeroen Minks Founder & Digital Marketing Specialist Vazooky Digital
Sprout Social is a great tool for managing all of your branded social media accounts. It is especially helpful with Instagram, which of course is almost entirely app-based to the point that you cannot make posts from a desktop or laptop computer.
With Sprout, we can upload our Instagram photos, type out the text and hashtags, and then schedule a posting time. Because Instagram is pretty strict with their app-only posting rule, the Sprout app will then give a mobile phone (of your choosing) a notification when it’s time to post on Instagram, and confirmation on a mobile device will take care of the rest.
It’s a useful workaround that we use nearly every day.
Jake McKenzie Content Manager https://www.autoaccessoriesgarage.com/
As a career agency professional specializing in digital and owning my own agency for the past 19+ years, I have a few thoughts on my favorite digital marketing resources/technologies.
Over the years, I’ve come to rely on one marketing technology platform more than any other and couldn’t live without it: Hootsuite.
For the past 11+ years, I’ve used Hootsuite Pro to manage all of my personal and professional social media profiles (down to 5 currently):
3 business Twitter profiles 2 personal Twitter profiles & LinkedIn
I use Hootsuite to schedule posts, shorten URLs and track clicks and monitor keywords. I also use the platform to track conversations and engage influencers. I augment Hootsuite with Mention.net (to track my business and personal brand across social platforms) and Commun.it (to identify engagement opportunities on Twitter).
I’ve outlined my overall strategy in the articles below:
Create a Social Media Strategy on a Shoestring with These Six Tipshttp://www.imediaconnection.com/articles/ported-articles/blogs/2015/oct/create-a-social-media-strategy-on-a-shoestring-with-these-six-tips/
Social Media (Marketing) Evangelist Job Description: http://blogs.imediaconnection.com/blog/2012/03/10/social-media-marketing-evangelist-job-description/
Related Resources: http://www.anvilmediainc.com/about/team/kent-lewis/ http://www.imediaconnection.com/get-connected/profile?id=23250
Kent Lewis President & Founder Anvilmediainc.com
Digital Marketer, Guy Kawasaki’s simple tip to post a comment on LinkedIn, then add your link as a separate comment below it is as effective as it is easy to adopt.
Views of my LinkedIn posts increased by hundreds overnight. I would read anything by Guy and trust it as solid gold advice. You should, too.
David Geer Cybersecurity Content Marketing Writer https://davidgeer.com
When it comes to analyzing the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, data is king. Being able to compare your company’s content and website data to those of your competitors is critical if you are competing for market share within your industry.
Competitor research of this variety can be costly and time-consuming, but there are some free tools that allow you to stack your content and website up against your competitors to see exactly where you stand.
One of my favorite free tools that provide these data is a Google Chrome extension MozBar. MozBar gives you instant metrics while viewing any page or Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
At a glance, you can determine how your Page Authority, Domain Authority, Back-links, Keyword Density, Meta Data, and more stacks up to your competitors. Moz does offer a paid version of MozBar that allows users access to additional premium features, but the free version is a great jumping-off point.
Another free tool that can provide you with powerful competitor insights is SEMrush. This tool not only allows you to view the traffic sources to your competitors’ websites but also allows you to monitor their paid advertising efforts.
You can use SEMrush to see if your rivals invested more in social media, paid advertising, or SEO These insights can help you figure out their active partnerships and try to predict their next steps by studying their referrals.
Once again, the free version is a great place to start but is limited to the number of inquiries you can make. They offer competitive pricing plans to unlock additional features.
Last but certainly not least is Screamingfrog’s free SEO Spider Tool. The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a website crawler that allows you to crawl your competition’s website and fetch key elements to analyze and audit technical and onsite SEO.
Using this tool, you can get a deep look into how your competitors are managing their website on a very technical level. The free version of the SEO Spider Tool allows you to analyze page titles and metadata, review meta robot and directives, and get an in-depth look at their site’s structure.
When you combine the information that you gather from each of these free tools, you can get an in-depth, data-driven, analysis of your competitors’ marketing efforts.
This type of competitor analysis lets you keep your finger on the pulse of your industry so that you know which strategies will give you maximum benefit. It allows you to understand how your marketing efforts stack-up against your competition.
Jacob Haneline Sr. Marketing Specialist / Data Analyst https://bonfyreapp.com
At Online Optimism, we use a large variety of tools to ensure marketing success.
In terms of digital marketing and SEO, we use tools like Moz to narrow down and choose keywords.
Moz allows us to track KPIs such as domain authority, search visibility, and keyword rankings. With this information in mind, we can adjust our strategies and plan campaigns to help our clients with visibility. We use these resources when creating content for websites and blogs.
In terms of advertising, specifically social media advertising, we use tools like Sprout Social.
Sprout Social provides us with a wealth of data on our social media performance, making it easy to track fans, followers, impressions, engagements, and link clicks for each client and on each platform.
It also allows us to receive and respond to messages and shares with followers on the platforms themselves. Ian Cogswell Content Marketing Specialist Onlineoptimism.com
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